To make missions more diverse, what about adding optional requests? Once you arrive to crash, or landing site, etc, you get a short brief when tell to you where are, and the main and secondary objetives.
Secondary should be optinal, yet gives to you some bonus, maybe some country loyalty, more cash, etc.
For example:
- rescue a VIP civilian -> A random civilian is generated, you need to protect him.
- Try to no destroy enviroment due unnestable situation. Maybe its a sensitive place, maybe is there a gas exhaust vents that makes explosive stuff not a very good idea
- Capture an alien is a must
- Generate some crates that must be recovered
- No civilian shoud see the UFO, so all civilian shoud be stunned.
- An infiltration mission against other humans, where you need to pick some stuff and the run, not need to kill everything (this could be great to try to recover a country from Aliens)
From Ufo: Aftemath i really like that you could do a rescue mission to recover a pilot from a failed intercept misison